Radar technology has transformed numerous aspects of travel and communications, including civilian and military air traffic control, defense equipment, and warfare, and has been adapted to many different applications. One particularly important application for radar is the airborne platform where the pilot or navigator can monitor other air traffic or locate a specific target, whether it is a civilian airport or an enemy encampment. The current practice for establishing airborne radar telemetry, or the radar's aspect to the ground or coverage area, is usually done prior to the mission without any meaningful consideration for optimum operational angles as a function of the purpose of the effort, the transmit frequency, and the anticipated terrain-type to be encountered. The users often improvise as to where they believe that the system will be most productive or employ trial and error techniques to estimate the operational angles, geographical parameters, and other factors. However, such estimates can be inaccurate because airborne radar systems invariably encounter a number of problems that are inherent with the airborne platform but not necessarily foreseeable during pre-flight mission planning, such as difficulties caused by signal degradation of RF transmission. This inaccuracy and lack of reliability also causes current airborne telemetry techniques to be inefficient from a time management and data collection point of view because the task needs to be repeated multiple times.
Although the basic phenomenology of radar returns is well-known to those skilled in the art and regularly employed to optimize the return signals within a single band, there has not yet been a systematic investigation of the correlation properties of returns generated within the same band using different polarization types. The lack of any systematic understanding of radar return correlation properties plus the current imprecise and ineffective trial and error approach to radar telemetry have led to numerous problems and difficulties with airborne radar systems. In order to overcome the prior art's difficulties, shortcomings, and limitations caused by the failure to systematically understand radar return correlation properties, the lack of accurate data collection, and the inefficiency of current data collection efforts, there has been a long-felt need for an airborne telemetry technique based on a more systematic understanding of radar return correlation properties that properly considers the optimum operational angles as a function of the purpose of the effort, the transmit frequency, and the terrain-type to be encountered during flight.